IntroductionFor
almost a year, I have enjoyed having the ability to record and play
back high-definition programming from Dish Network on my Dish Player
921 satellite receiver/PVR combination machine. It has been a true
workhorse, recording my favorite shows without fail, having virtually
no downtime and other than the occasional lock-up that usually just
requires a simple re-boot (these PVRs are essentially computers in an
AV-like metal box), it has been a nearly flawless performer. It has
powered my main home theater and has given me hundreds if not thousands
of hours of HDTV viewing bliss, but something was seemingly missing. I
recently cooked up the idea of adding a second television to my living
room/kitchen area downstairs, but I didn’t want to have to install a
second dedicated satellite receiver and PVR to control this TV. Enter
the Dish Player 942 dual mode HDTV satellite receiver/PVR.

Dish
Network last year released an ingenious product for standard-def TVs,
the 522-satellite receiver, which allowed two different TVs to utilize
the same PVR. With the $699 Dish Player 942, the engineers at Dish
Network have now taken the concept of the 522 and made a
high-definition version that allows one television to receive an HDTV
signal and another one to receiver a standard-definition signal. No
more fighting about what to watch, as one person can be in the living
room watching a movie or sporting event in HD and another person can be
watching the same show or something else in standard definition via the
secondary output on the back of the 942. Two separate color-coded
remotes labeled 1 and 2 at the bottom are included that offer separate
control of the 942. The remote that controls the HD half of the 942 is
infrared and the remote for the SD-only portion of the receiver uses a
RF connection to a small antenna, making it possible for the other TV
to be located on the other side of the house.

My Dish
942 was professionally installed by a Dish Network representative and I
recommend that you have any Dish Network product installed this way,
especially these new-generation dual mode boxes, as they require extra
runs of coax cable between them the satellite switches and the TV sets.
Long gone are the days of simply running a single cable from one LNB
connecter on your satellite into the receiver. Why are all of these
cables needed, you ask? With more and more satellites floating in outer
space, the newer dishes, such as the killer new Dish Network Dish 1000,
are able to receive multiple satellite signals that are then fed to a
multi-switch. Instead of reading a lengthy treatise about satellite
wiring, just know that with the Dish 942 and the special switch that it
requires, along with an over the air antenna, will give users the
ability to either watch or record five completely separate programs
simultaneously. No longer will you have any excuses for missing your
favorite shows, even if they are all on at the same time. Even if your
home does not have an open crawlspace for running these extra cable
runs, the installer will be able to discreetly run cables along
floorboards or under the edges of your carpet.

The 942 is only three-and-a-half inches tall, 16 inches wide, 13 inches
deep and weighs 11 pounds, making it a much smaller piece of gear than
the Dish Player 921 it replaced in my system. On the front of the unit,
a series of colored lights indicate what mode the receiver is in and
tells you if programs are being recorded on the two different sections.
Individual power lights for each zone are shown on the front panel and
undoubtedly people who are using zone two in a separate room will
frequently forget to turn of their half of the receiver, since they
likely don’t have the box in the room with them while they are watching
TV with it. However, the indicator lights will remind you when it’s
left on.

The styling of the 942 is very understated and, other than the rows of
different color lights, this muted gray/silver box does not call
attention to itself in a rack. The front panels are smooth and have
very squared-off lines. The right third of the 942 has a panel that
flips down when pressed that allows access to the main controls, as
well as a USB port for connecting items like Dish Network’s portable
Pocket Dish. As long as you don’t misplace your remote controls, you’ll
rarely need to ever even flip this panel down. The left side panel
covers a slot for a smart card that is currently unused. However, Dish
Network will have the ability to assign cards for users, likely for the
purpose of someday controlling the streaming of exclusive HDTV content
that is not recordable (if I had to take a guess).

An internal 250-gig hard drive allows you to record up to 180 hours of
standard-definition programming or 25 hours of high-def. Keep in mind
that you don’t get 25 hours of HD and 180 hours of SD. If you had
12-and-a-half hours of HD programs saved, you would have approximately
90 hours left for SD programming or another 12-and-a-half hours left
for HD. You can save your standard def programs and dump them off to a
DVD burner or VHS tape. However, you will not be able to output a
recordable signal with HD content via the HDMI connector to record onto
a D-VHS tape, so if you want to archive an HD show or movie, it will
take up valuable space on your hard drive. I keep one or two HD shows
for wowing my friends when they visit, but I like to keep the hard
drive free. Protecting a show with the onscreen menus is simple and,
when a show is protected, a gold lock icon comes up next to it and it
will not get erased. If the hard drive is otherwise full, it will
record over non-protected events, but the locked ones will stay put.

The
back of the 942 features two very distinct output sections and there is
no question as to which is the HD output section and which is the SD
output plugs. Zone 1 outputs the HD signal and has options for either
analog HD via component video HDMI digital AV output. If you have a set
with a digital input, I highly recommend using the latter. The
supported video output resolutions for TV Zone 1 are 480p, 720p and
1080i. 480i content is up-converted to 480p and my particular TV set
can accept all of these formats. I found the best setting for the
output on TV1 to be the 720p setting.

Where the older 921
had a DVI output, the Dish Player 942 now has a more modern HDMI
output. This streamlined my system, as I no longer required a DVI to
HDMI adapter to send the signal into the HDMI switching input card on
the Integra DTR-10.5 receiver. I have not had any HDMI handshake issues
with either the DVI output on the Dish Network 921 or the Dish Network
942, but as a consumer, I’d take a look at what kind of inputs you have
on your receiver, AV preamp and TV, so you can have the right cables at
the ready. If you are doing a simple straight into your digital input
connection, the 942 comes with a decent quality HDMI cable. However,
you might want to look into higher-end options if you are going for
ultimate performance.

HDTV PerformanceWith
the Dish Player 942 set up and ready to go, I picked a few of my
favorite high-definition movies with the onscreen guide that is updated
to go as far ahead in time as two weeks and set them to record. It’s a
fairly simple interface that, although still not as slick as TiVo, is a
marked improvement over the pale light washed-out blue onscreen
graphics of the 921. The first show I recorded was the classic Mafia
epic “Goodfellas,” recorded from HBO HD. There are DVD players that
will up-scale standard 480p content, but this pails in comparison to an
excellent transfer of a movie to HD that is broadcast on Showtime HD,
HBO HD or even HD-Net’s 1080i HD-Net Movie channel. TNT’s movies are
seemingly broadcast in a strange aspect ratio that doesn’t quite fit
the screen right, regardless of what picture format the Dish Player or
TV is set on, but that is another story.

On “Goodfellas,”
in the scene where Henry Hill as a young kid is breaking the back
windows of a bunch of cars stored in a parking lot to throw gasoline in
them and light them on fire, the recorded version of the movie looked
just as good played back on the 942 as when I watched it live. This
tells me that either all live content that is being watched through the
942 is already going through a buffer or that it is recorded at such a
high bit rate that it plays back with only the most minimal of signal
loss. When Henry Hill sets fire to the cars and runs towards the screen
with an exploding inferno in the background, the 942 did not show any
signs of tiling and only the most minimal amount of dot crawl along the
bright edges of the flames from the explosion. At the end of this
scene, the screen pauses with the silhouette of young Henry Hill diving
from the fire as Ray Liotta, who plays the older Henry, talks in
voiceover about what its like to be a gangster. With this picture
locked on the screen, I was able to really look for flaws in the image
and was hard-pressed to find fault with anything.

Dish Network has purchased the satellites that were originally launched
for the Voom network and have made these channels an option for
subscribers who have the high-definition package. For only $5 more a
month, I was able to expand my total number of available channels. I
did a search for live music and found a high-def performance by the
pop/jazz fusion group Chicago. Live music is great for HD programming,
as the lighting can be very controlled and the extra definition in the
picture allows you, if you are so inclined, to better study every
little intricate detail of what the musicians are doing. On this
recording, the 1080i broadcast of Chicago performing live was so
spectacular I could watch the fingering patterns of the trumpet players
when the camera would cut to the horn section during the classic song
“25 Or 6 to 4.” Being a drummer myself, I realized that, with the
slow-motion feature on the Dish Player 942, I could frame by frame or
slow-mo a scene and learn the drum patterns to any of the songs on this
hour-plus-long show. The only time the picture faltered was in very
dark scenes with low lighting when the house lights would dim. My own
TV set is to blame here, as low black levels are still one of the flaws
of older projection TV sets.

The Dish Player 942 has the ability to record shows that are broadcast
in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and can be played back via the
Tos-Link output or over the HDMI cable if your receiver has the ability
to decode a digital audio signal that it sent to its HDMI input. The
Dish 921, with only a DVI output, would not allow for this. In my
system, I opted to use an analog stereo output going from the 942 to
the TV and then a Tos-Link connection into my Integra receiver for
decoding the Dolby Digital and I could control the TV and receiver
audio levels separately. On the Chicago recording, the sound from the
942 was technically perfect, with absolutely no dropouts or glitches of
any kind. Sonically, the tonal quality was not overly bright but not
dull in any way. It was as if it was not putting any kind of sound
signature on the music and was just letting the sound get to the
speakers as the mixing engineers wanted it to do.

Sporting
events drive the sales of many HDTVs, so as it’s football season, I
recorded a game on ESPN’s spectacular-looking Sunday night game. The
classic NFC rivalry that pitted the Pittsburg Steelers vs. the
Cleveland Browns turned out to be a pretty darn good game and what took
it over the top was the smooth, crisp-looking broadcast from ESPN. I
took a cue from the officials and used the pause and slow-mo features
on the Dish 942 to see how much detail there was on screen from the
faces of the fans to the laces on the ball and the torn-up turf. I
don’t know what magic ESPN does with these broadcasts, but they a
superior to the FOX, CBS and especially the borderline dreadful Monday
Night Football HD Broadcasts on ABC.

During this game, I
found one little quirk in the remote control that I did not like at
first but have now grown to enjoy. When pressing play after pausing,
the action moves back about one second before resuming. This was
annoying at first, as I was watching a play late in the second quarter
where the Steelers almost scored on a goal line rushing play. I wanted
to freeze-frame the game, then play back the action to see if it was
actually a touchdown or not. I found ultimately that I could pause the
action right at the moment I wanted to see, then toggle between play
and pause several times, and I could basically loop a two-second piece
of the action without having to stop and rewind it repeatedly. The
point was all moot as Jerome “The Bus” Bettis plowed through the line
on the next play for a one-yard touchdown, but with the combination of
the high-definition broadcast and the playback logic built into the
942, I was able to be my own officiating crew.

Standard-Definition PerformanceI
have yet to meet anyone who got a big screen HDTV and then just raved
about the SD performance on it. Sure, the gleaming chrome on big street
hogs looks mind-blowing on “American Choppers” on Discovery, but until
there is more quality HD content available, you will be watching a fair
amount of your programming in the SD format. I have had several tuners
in my system and thankfully I have seen the SD performance increase
steadily as I have worked through the progression of Dish Network
receivers. Live sporting events in standard definition on a big screen
like my JVC 61-inch HD-ILA have always been a little tough to watch, as
the 480p to 720p or 1080i up-scaling has just not looked quite right,
but it is the best I have seen yet with the Dish Player 942.

One
channel that has always struggled is the horseracing network TVG Ch.
405. They show live races from around the world and often the in-studio
graphics look fairly clean and watchable. However, the actual live feed
from the different tracks that plays in the center window is already a
little choppy to begin with, and it becomes more so if you have a
sketchy receiver that is not doing a good job of up-sampling the SD
picture. When I put the 942 into my system, my immediate reaction was
that the high-def picture looked good already and still looked good,
but what improved the most was all of the standard-definition
programming. Watching quarter horse racing from Los Alamitos,
California had previously been almost an exercise in futility. You
could see the starting gate fairly well before, but when these fast
horses started tearing down the track, there was always some pretty bad
pixilation around the moving objects on the screen and when the horses
were around the far corner, you could not read the numbers on the
horses and had to listen carefully to track announcer Ed Burgart to be
able to tell what specifically was happening. With the 942, the picture
is still not three-dimensional or ultra-refined, but the odds of being
able to see the horse’s numbers on the sashes have gone up quite
substantially. There are still some undefined edges on the horses and
slightly blurry “halos” around the moving objects on screen some of the
time, but the improvement was enough to make me really stand up and
take notice.

I
have found that I try to lean towards watching HD content as much as I
can, but there are times when you just want to plop down on the TV and
watch some music videos or a brainless game show on a
standard-definition channel. Again, as with the horseracing channel,
there is almost nothing on a standard-def channel that is of noteworthy
picture quality, so the goal I have for SD is to have it not be so bad
that it’s annoying to watch. I have been following the trials and
tribulations of Adam Carolla as he rebuilds his childhood home on the
TLC show “The Adam Carolla Project.” Adam will be quick to tell you
that showbiz has made him “literally a millionaire, literally” and from
the collection of cars and homes that he has amassed that is quite
evident that he is telling the truth. One of the first things I ever
saw in standard-def on the 942 that made me stop and take notice was
the overhead helicopter shot of one of Adam’s Hollywood Hills mansions.
The scenic images of the Hollywood hills and blue sky actually had some
depth and color saturation that was better than I had come to expect
from standard-definition programming.

The SD picture on
my smaller Dell LCD monitor, which received input from the second half
of the 942, is very smooth and looks as good as any digital cable or
satellite picture that is not connected via a DVI or HDMI cable. This
is mostly due to the fact that it is a smaller picture to begin with
and the signal does not have to stretch to fill such a large area as
with the 61-inch HDTV set. I also have a redundant feed going to the
DVI input of the Dell set that is powered by a PureLink DVI
distribution box. However, for this review, I used the RCA composite
video inputs of the TV, fed by the TV 2 output of the Dish Player 942.

Besides watching separate live shows on two different sets, the Dish
942 allows the users to pull content from a shared list of prerecorded
events. If one family member recorded “Saturday Night Live” using the
high-def half of the 942, the viewer in the other room could watch that
same show, albeit it in scaled-down 480p, on their TV. In dual mode,
the TVs in the main room and the secondary room can operate
independently. In single mode, the primary HDTV can do
picture-in-picture mode and the same show can be output to both TVs at
the same time. I use this mode if I am cooking and want to watch the a
prerecorded or live show in my kitchen, but want to use the speakers in
my home theater for sound instead of the much smaller speakers on the
Dell flat screen TV.

The DownsideThe
only technical downside I noticed with the 942 was the fact that the
highest-quality connection available for connection to the
standard-definition TV set is composite video via an RCA cable
connection. You can also run a coax cable into your TV if you wish.
However, I would have liked to see at least an S-Video output as an
option. I’m probably splitting hairs, considering that this is the
standard-def output and it pales in comparison to the uncompressed HDMI
output that is going to my HD set, but I’d like the best picture I can
get on both sets.

The user interface, although improved
over previous dish network models, does not have quite the
user-friendly interface that TiVo has. Until you get the hang of it,
setting shows up to record is not as easy as with a TiVo. If you are
watching a show and decide you want to record it halfway through, you
can do this, however you have to remember to rewind back to where you
want to start recording then press the record button. TiVo is smart
enough to know that you want the previous content and assuming it has
the show stored up in its internal buffer, as long as you have not
changed the channel in a while, it will go back and grab the previous
part of the show that it has stored in memory and inserts it into the
show as it records the rest of it.

ConclusionThe
Dish Player 942 takes the 921 to the next level with a whole laundry
list of improvements. It is smaller, more versatile, can control two
different TVs, pulls more over-the-air HD channels and is the most
stable dish network PVR receiver that I have ever used. I have not had
to do more than one hard reboot of the 942 in the several months that I
have had it in my system.

Standard-def performance is one
of the shortcomings of moving to a large screen rear-projection TV set
and I had not been thrilled with the SD performance on any receiver
that I have had in my system. I can say without reservation that the
942 has improved the standard-definition picture on my HD set.

TiVo is still the gold standard for user interfaces and one of my
knocks on other non-TiVo machines is their cold and sterile-looking
menus. With the 942, the menus have a softer, more cartoonish look and
have brighter colors and more defined borders that make reading them
from a long distance much easier on the eyes. The menus are also
slightly less translucent than those of the Dish Player 921, making
them easier to read as well. The logic for setting up shows to record
on a weekly, monthly or daily basis can still be a little tricky and
not as smooth as TiVo’s season pass feature, but I have ultimately come
to appreciate the Dish Network method because I had previously set
season passes on my TiVo only to have my favorite shows stop recording
weekly because technically the season ended, but I wanted to catch a
few repeats.

A small monthly fee is charged for each PVR receiver that you have in
your home system. However, if you have the “America’s Everything”
programming package, Dish Network automatically waives this PVR fee.
This gives users big incentive to pay a little more for programming
since they are saving on their bill from a hardware standpoint. A
working phone connection must always be connected to the receiver.
Otherwise, a warning will pop up on the screen, letting you know that
you will be charged for a second receiver.

In a world where everyone gets nickled and dimed with fees on
everything from their cell phone bill to gym memberships, the Dish 942
can actually help you save money. You could buy or lease a Dish Player
921 for your HDTV and then buy or lease a separate 510 SD PVR, but
you’d still be left either having to pay two receiver fees if you don’t
have the “America’s Everything” package and you still wouldn’t have the
flexibility to share recorded shows between the two sets. The 942
really shines from both a technological and financial standpoint, which
can mean hundreds of dollars of fees saved and frees up space in your
equipment rack. It even comes with an HDMI cable and component video
cables, two items that can set you back a surprising amount of money
when you realize that you need them, so having them included in the box
is another nice touch, courtesy of Dish Network.

The next logical progression in the evolution of this brilliant shared
PVR concept will be a unit that has the ability to send two completely
discrete HD signals out to two different HD monitors. I have no doubt
that the engineers at Dish Network are working on something like this.
A lot of buzz has been going around about MPEG 4 satellite receivers
and, although the Dish Network 942 is an MPEG 2 box, the fact that Dish
Network gives users the less expensive lease option makes users not
feel burned by sinking too much money into equipment, only to have to
upgrade or change it at some point in the near future. Until MPEG 4
receivers are more than just a fantasy on the horizon, the Dish Network
942 is easily the best option that you can get for your HDTV viewing
pleasure.